The Twelfth Planet

The Twelfth Planet, by Zecharia Sitchin, is presented as an ancient-astronaut interpretation of myth and scripture: what might appear to be supernatural stories are treated as memories of beings who came to Earth from the heavens. Its particular importance in the book’s wider discussion is the way this reading of human origins resembles elements of Varg Vikernes’s cosmology, while remaining a distinct modern interpretation of ancient sources.

Publication and Premise

Sitchin released The Twelfth Planet in the same year that The Sirius Mystery appeared. In describing his approach, the book presents mythology not as mere fantasy but as a repository of ancient memories. It also treats the Bible as a literal historical and scientific document, and proposes that civilizations older and more advanced than commonly assumed arose from knowledge brought to Earth by the Anunnaki. Sitchin expressed confidence that modern science would continue to confirm this account.

The book therefore asks its readers to reverse the usual relationship between myth and history. Rather than taking mythic narratives as imaginative explanations of the past, it reads them as records of encounters whose meanings have been obscured or misinterpreted. Its account makes ancient texts evidence for an extraterrestrial history of human civilization.

The Nefilim and Human Origins

Sitchin’s interest in this field began with the Nefilim described in Genesis, Chapter Six of the Old Testament. In that passage, they are identified as sons of the gods who took human women as wives before the great flood. The term is often rendered as giants, a translation that suggests a primordial age when such beings lived on Earth.

Sitchin instead gives the name a literal extraterrestrial meaning: those who came down to Earth from the heavens. In his interpretation, the beings described as fallen angels were spacefarers who joined with human women. Their offspring carried superior DNA, and that inheritance supposedly produced a leap in human genetic and cultural development. The theory connects this asserted transformation to the flourishing of Mesopotamian cultures, making human civilization the consequence of contact and mixture rather than an exclusively terrestrial process.

Relation to the Book’s Wider Argument

The account draws a comparison between Sitchin’s ancient-astronaut narrative and the occult elements of Vikernes’s outlook. The resemblance is specifically thematic: both place human origins or development in relation to beings beyond ordinary humanity. Elsewhere, the discussion notes that gods from Sirius also appear in Vikernes’s ideas, a point that helps situate the comparison within a wider pop-esoteric interest in extraterrestrial origins. The material does not establish that The Twelfth Planet directly shaped Vikernes’s beliefs.

That distinction matters because the surrounding discussion also describes a different route by which Black Metal became associated with the ancient past. Bathory’s Blood Fire Death turned from the band’s earlier Satanic imagery toward Nordic heathen mythology, while Vikernes described the old Norse gods as archetypes of a Northern people and framed his own actions as a revival of ancestral forces. The book also notes that contemporary Ásatrú organizations existed independently of the Black Metal scene, despite public assumptions linking them. Against that backdrop, Sitchin’s theory is one instance of a broader effort to read inherited myths as evidence about origins, but it is not interchangeable with Nordic heathen revival or proof of a connection between those religious practitioners and the music scene.